Reprinted from Socrau Forces 
Vol. V, No. 2, December, 1926 


eee Yh ae 


THE COMMUNITY AND 
NEIGHBORHOOD 


This department is conducted by Tue NaTIONAL Community CENTER ASSOCIATION, and is edited by Leroy E. 
Bowman, 503 Kent Hall, Columbia University, New York City. 


A COMMUNITY IN FLUX 


THe Cyicaco Guetto Rr-SuRVEYED 


MAURICE H. KROUT 


= ERE configurations in space or 
re M chance aggregates of contiguous 
A individuals do not of themselves 
make acommunity. The community has 
not only a spatial but also a temporal 
aspect. From the point of view of tem- 
poral distribution the community means 
more than ‘‘living’’; it means ‘living 
together.”’ The psycho-social or truly 
human environment, measured temporally, 
includes on the one hand intercom- 
munication and interaction, and on the 
other the resulting practices and traditions 
of human beings. It is these that make 
“living together’ possible. Distribution 
in space does undeniably represent the 
existence of individuals; but their inter- 
action as group members may be undetr- 
stood only if seen as a historical process 
moving through time. 

Since this is an inquiry into the transi- 
tional aspects of an urban area, the aim 
here is to view the community chiefly as a 
psycho-social process. Structure must be 
viewed not as an end in itself but as a 
means to the end sought, namely the 
process. Social anatomy makes social 
physiology or social pathology more 
understandable. 


I. PHYSICO-GEOGRAPHIC ASPECTS 


The community under discussion oc- 
cupies the Near-West Side of Chicago. 


273 


It extends somewhat over two miles west 
of the Chicago river and has an area of 
about fifteen square miles. 

In a recent survey of the social and 
recreational needs of the Jewish popula- 
tion of the city the boundaries of the Near- 
West Side were fixed at State Street on the 
east, Western Avenue on the west, 
Twenty-Second Street on the south, and 
Madison Street on the north (Jewish 
Welfare Board, 1923). These boundaries 
are not based on barriers to free movement 
which segregate communities and are not 
historically defensible. The Near-West 
Side, as a geographic unit at least, appears 
to be delimited by railroad belts on each 
of its four sides. Thus Clinton Street has 
been its eastern boundary, Rockwell 
Street the western boundary, Fifteenth 
Place the southern boundary, and Kinzie 
Street the northern boundary. 

Although the Near-West Side as de- 
fined above has been the home of many 
language groups, yet it has attracted 
especial attention chiefly because it has 
included the Ghetto neighborhood of 
Chicago. The limits of this section have 
varied at different times; but at present the 
eastern border is found at Union Street, 
the southern border at Fourteenth Street, 
the western border at Robey Street, and 
the northern border may be drawn as a 
broken line conformable in a general way 


pow Pa 


ie J 2 , : 
Pi cele i 


274 


to Taylor Street but deviating from it 
northward, at many points as far as Polk 
Street. These boundaries have appeared 
on the spot-map of the Jewish Social 
Service Bureau of Chicago. According 
to the records of this agency these lines 
represent the distribution of service and 
relief cases in the locality during a period 
of two years (1921-23). Considering 
the density of population in the Ghetto 
(given later) and the uniformly low eco- 
nomic status of its residents as evidenced 
by the housing facilities (described later), 
the boundaries adapted from the map of 
the bureau may be assumed to divide the 
Ghetto of today from the other colonies of 
the Near-West Side. 

The actual Jewish population of the 
Ghetto, or of the city as a whole, is a 
matter of conjecture, although estimates 
are not wanting. In the survey of 1923 
the Jewish population of Chicago was 
estimated to be 285,000 and that of the 
Ghetto to approximate 72,000. More 
accurate however is probably the estimate 
furnished the Daily News Almanac by 
Mr. Louis M. Cahn, Executive Director 
of the Jewish Charities, in 1924, giving 
225,000 as the figure most closely ap- 
proximating the number of Jews in the 
entire city and 60,000 as the figure repre- 
senting the Jews of the Near-West Side. 

The population maps of the official 
United States Census of 1910 gives the 
density of the population on the Near- 


West_Sidewas varying from 15,677 per 
square block in the densest section to 


2,612 on the extreme west and 1,671 on the 
extremhe east; the average being 10,023 per 
square block. A more recent inquiry 
made by the local Council of Social 
Agencies estimated the density of popula- 
tion (February, 1921) to be 50,000 to 
25,000 per square mile westward along 
Twelfth Street (Roosevelt Road), begin- 
ning at Halsted Street; and from 5,000 to 


SOCIAL FORCES 


25,000 eastward from Halsted to Clinton 
Street. 

The congestion on the Neat-West Side 
as brought out in the survey of the Jewish 
Welfare Board is indicated by the fact 
that everyone of the typical frame dwel- 
lings has an average of 2.5 families each, 
whereas the average for the entire city, 
according to the United States Census of 
1920, is only 1.8 families to a dwelling. 

The existence of the inevitable com- 
panions of congestion, low rents and high 
land values, is proved by the studies and 
maps of the Illinois Bell Telephone Com- 
pany and the Chicago Zoning Commis- 
sion. With high land values, in a transi- 
tional area, go moldering structures and 
with cheap rents go cheerless living 
quarters. This condition has had two 
practical results. Because it enabled the 
immigrant to “‘start’’ at all by “‘starting’’ 
at the proverbial “‘bottom’’, the Near- 
West Side became a convenient area of 
first settlement. Because of its wide- 
spread squallor and discomforts, it became 
a standing menace to the health and 
security not only of its own residents but 
also of the members of the larger com- 
munity. 


II. PHYSICO SOCIAL PROCESSES 


Speaking of this as ‘‘probably the poor- 
est and most crowded section of Chicago’’ 
Hull House residents, thirty years ago 
(1895), described the Near-West Side as 
an area containing three typical kinds of 
dwellings: the pioneer one-story cottage, 
the brick tenement three or four stories 
high, and the ‘‘deadly rear tenement’’, 
often the “‘workshop of the sweater.’’ 
Interspersed among these were also a 
few desirable buildings. The district at 
this time boasted of its Metropolitan Hall, 
‘the operatic center of the Ghetto,’’ then 
located at Jefferson and Maxwell Streets, 
the West Side Auditorium at Racine 


COMMUNITY AND NEIGHBORHOOD 


Avenue and Taylor Street, and a handful 
of “‘the better homes’’ on DeKoven, 
Bunker, and Forquer Streets.! 

Since “‘the worse homes’’ were con- 
siderably in the majority nevertheless, 
the Hull House residents raised the cry 
for ‘Sanitation and Comfort.’’ This was 
a cry in the wilderness, for it rang out 
again just as insistently in 1911, when 
Miss Alzada Comstock published her 
studies on the housing facilities of 
Chicago. Speaking of the Neat-West 
Side, she said: 


For those who can not afford to move away from 
such districts as these the situation is far more 
difficult; even the fundamental matter of health must 
be disregarded in the problem of making both ends 
meet; tenants have neither the money nor the in- 
fluence to bring about necessary changes and im- 
provements; they must take those old, dingy, fre- 
quently broken-down houses and endure the con- 
sequences with small hope of being able to better 
their condition.” 


The proprietors of Ghetto dwellings 
have long refrained from improving their 
properties, expecting that ultimately a 
railroad or industry would ‘“‘make an 
offer.’’ The steady decrease in the num- 
ber of houses and the increased demand for 


them in this vicinity have not only forti-. 


fied the landlords in their position of in- 
difference as regards repairs but have 
stimulated them to advance the rents. 
The certainty of renting their ramshackle 
cottages and tenements, the fact that 
existing rentals even if advanced still 
remain by far the lowest in the city, and 
the unfortunate possibility of meeting 
higher rent with greater crowding (the 
increase being in the last analysis met by 
the addition of a boarder or two) has 


1 Hull House Maps and Papers, by Hull House 
Residents; p. 5. 

aA Pie Constock. 
Chicago,”’ 
2437244. 


“Housing Conditions in 
American Journal of Sociology, xviii, 


275 


created a vicious circle running somewhat 
thus: crowded quarters—higher rental; 
higher rental—further crowding; further 
crowding—still higher rental; still higher 
rental—still more crowding; etc. 

When the residents of Hull House and 
Miss Comstock described the housing 
situation on the Near-West Side the possi- 
bility of a vicious circle was obviated by 
the fact that vacant lots, which could re- 
lieve congestion, were still to be found.’ 
Residents could, if they had sufficient 
means, repair to the open lots and build 
cottages of their own or else occupy such 
tenement houses as income-seeking land- 
lords saw fit to erect on these lots. But at 
present wherever one casts his eye there 
are neglected frame shanties or flat- 
buildings of crumbled brick, without 
light or bath or adequate drainage. 

The deterioration of this part of the city 
as. a residential area is intimately con- 
nected with its rapid industrialization. 


The process has been fully as certain as 


it has been insidious. Thirty years ago 
the residents of Hull House saw its be- 
gining, and such expressions as ““The 
sturdy growth of brick blocks for indus- 
trial purposes’’ are met often in their 
study. But there are a few important 
points of difference between the conditions 
that prevailed in 1895 and those which 


‘prevail today. Thirty years ago the 


existence of factories evinced surprise in 
spite of the congestion and filth (which 
indeed. were hardly connected with the 
industrialization of the region), for the 
Near-West Side was still essentially a 
residential district. Now, however, the 
process is so well-defined that it is the 
presence of a recalcitrant dwelling, rather 
than the presence of a factory or store, 
that evinces the surprise of the onlooker. 
Further, in the end of the last century the 


3 Hull House Residents, op. cit., p. 5; vide, also, 
A, P, Comstock, op. cit., P- 2.46 ff. 


276 


process of substitution was proceeding in 
a tather sporadic manner, factories and 
shops often springing up where they were 
least expected. The process now is far 
more systematic. The inroads made by 
commerce and industry generally begin 
at the periphery and proceed toward the 
center, thus gradually diminishing the 
residential core of the Near-West Side. 
These transformations are not of purely 
local significance, for they find their 
counterpart in similar transformations, 
long since completed, in the older down- 
town section of Chicago with which the 
Near-West Side is continuous. The tend- 
ency of a pioneer section to turn into an 
“uninhabited wilderness’’ in the very 
heart of the city and slowly to absorb 
adjoining territory has been well known 
to city-plan commissions and students of 
city growth. In Chicago, the section 
just east of the Near-West Side was the 
first to be settled. It was there, on the 
sand dunes of Lake Michigan, that Fort 
Dearborn was built and defended against 
the onslaughts of the Pottawattomies. 
From an undifferentiated, largely resi- 
dential and retail-business area, to which 
the small brick houses on Michigan boule- 
vatd and its many hotels still testify, the 
loop became converted into a commercial 
and light-manufacturing area. The same 
change seems to be facing the Near-West 
Side. For years this section of the city 
shared with the Near-South and the 
Lower-North Sides the duty of providing 
an outlet for the overflow of population 
from the city nucleus. But at last the 
Near-West Side has become the long- 
expected physical adjunct of the loop, 
accommodating more and more wholesale 
houses, warehouses, and manufacturing 
establishments.4- The strategic location 


‘The Zoning Commission of Chicago, realizing 
the inevitableness of the change, has already assigned 
the Near-West Side for this purpose. 


SOCIAL FORCES 


of the Ghetto with reference to the central 
buying section of the city seems thus to 
have determined the nature of the locality, 
and so far as physico-geographic factors go, 
to have influenced the fate of its residents. 


III. PSYCHO-SOCIAL PROCESSES 


The Near-West Side has been called the 
most cosmopolitan part of Chicago. The 
colorful character of the area has been due 
to the changes in its population. 

Every group, whether as small as a 
family or as large as a nation, has its own 
institutions and patterns of conduct, which 
tend to segregate it fromother groups. To 
say this is not to imply that the common 
elements in the cultures of segregated 
groups do not play a vital rdle in inter- 
group relations. But it is to point out 
that, historically, because of the existence 
of certain combinations of subjective at- 
titudes and objective factors merged into 
a social situation, groups found them- 
selves leading a relatively detached exist- 
ence. Such isolation has been typically 
true of nations. But on the Near-West 
Side of Chicago, where “‘extraterritoriality 
rights’ Wd neither be demanded nor 
granted, the district has been exposed to 
the invastions of different language 
groups, which have crisscrossed the area 
and, in stubborn competition with one 
another, succeeded in usurping now one, 
now another part of it. Ultimately how- 
ever the unity of the victorious group was 
in every case disrupted and the group was 
forced to seek new regions for peaceful 
conquest. 

At the time the Near-West Side was still 
a wild-prairie region encircling the city 
proper or the present “‘loop section,’ 
some unmarried American farmers from 
the outlying agricultural regions of IIli- 
nois and a few neighboring states came to 
settle in this part of Chicago. Between 
the fifties and the seventies these pioneers 


COMMUNITY AND NEIGHBORHOOD 


were rather timidly joined by a few Ger- 
man-Scandinavian, French, and Irish fami- 
lies. These removed in various directions 
as soon as it became evident that the 
Bohemians were intent on populating 
the area as a language group. The Irish 
settled on the northeast, around Forquer 
and Polk Streets. The German-Scan- 
dinavian element forsook this section com- 
pletely for a young colony which then 
sprang up on the Far-North Side. The 
poorer classes of the French settled on the 
north-west, around Vernon Park, and 
further west. 

The tide of Bohemian migration began 
soon after the failure of the Pan-Slavic 
Congress of 1848 and the suppression of 
Bohemia by Austria, but it swelled to 
considerable proportions after the Austro- 
Italian wars of the sixties. Before the 
great fire of 1871 there was already an 
appreciable number of Bohemians in 
Chicago, and in 1883, when Marcy Center 
was founded on the Near-West Side, they 
gave this region a definite Bohemian tinge. 
At the time Marcy opened its doors the 
Czechs occupied the entire distance from 
Canal Street to Blue Island Avenue and 
extended rather thinly further west. 
They numbered about 70,000 in Chicago, 
and fully two-thirds of their number were 
situated on the Near-West Side.’ This 
liberty-loving country folk had come here 
because the West Side was largely ‘‘vir- 
gin soil,’’ with scarcely a dwelling for 
blocks. When however other migrants, 
principally those of the Jewish group, be- 
gan actively to settle, the Czechs found 
this section too crowded, and following 
their love for freedom and the open coun- 
try, they betook themselves to the south 
and the southwest.® 


5 Vide Zeman’s article in Hull House Maps and 
Papers. 

6 To this day Bohemians are found largely in the 
south-western suburbs of Chicago, such as Cicero 


sod 


The Jewish group dates its settlement to 
the forties of the last century, when 
religious persecutions in Germany became 
especially intense.’ The attempt at 
founding an agricultural colony in Illi- 
nois failed, and the Jews settled in the 
heart of the loop section where commerce 
could be best pursued. Their activities 
were facilitated by the building of the 
Illinois and Michigan Canal and the 
Galena and Chicago Railroad to Joliet, 
completed in 1849. After recovering from 
the Cholera epidemic which swept Chicago 
in the late forties, the Jewish colonists 
were again thrown into turmoil by the 
Chicago fire which confined itself almost 
entirely to the area east of the river.® 
Following the fire, the Jewish group de- 
terminedly crossed the river and began to 
stream into the Near-West and the Near 
South Sides. At first locating in the 
north-east portion of the West Side, 
around Lake and Washington Streets, 
they soon began coming southward sup- 
planting, as they did so, the Czecho- 
Slovak and Irish groups. In the eighties 
and nineties the German Jews were joined 
by their Russian-Polish coreligionists 
driven by the Russian excesses of the time. °® 
But no sooner had the Jews reached the 
south-western and western parts of the 
district than Italians from the northeast 
gradually began descending upon them 
with the intention of “‘seizing their 


and Brookfield, although there is still a considerable 
colony south of Sixteenth Street along Halsted and 
west of it.” 

7Felsenthal and Eliassof, Héstory of Kehillath 
Anshe Maarib; also, Herman Eliassof, The Jews of 
Illinois, Reform Advocate, May 4, 1901; p. 288 ff. 

8 Andreas, History of Chicago, vol. iii. 

9 Since 1905 an increasing number of Lithuanians, 
Russians, and Poles have joined the Jewish settlers 
in the Ghetto either on the basis of an old familigrity 
dating back to Europe or because of the practical 
necessity on the part of the slowly-assimilating 
Slav to resort to the aid of the more readily assimila- 
ble Jew in adjusting to the American environment. 


278 


territory.’’ At this time the German 
Jews had practically vacated the area and 
moved to what the Russian-Polish group 
somewhat derisively termed ‘‘Deutsch- 
land’ and what is now known as the 
Lawndale district.!° 

Originally the Italians sought a new 
land because of impoverished finances and 
a desite to make themselves more com- 
fortable and to be of more service to 
their fatherland. Says Mastro-Valerio in 
speaking of his countrymen: 


They leave the mother-country with the firm 
intention of going back to it as soon as their scarsellas 
shall sound with plenty of quibus.¥ 


His hope pinned to a triumphant return 
to his native land, the Italian never sold 
his properties in Italy but instead leased 
them, in order that upon coming back he 
might regain possession of them. Because 
of this attitude, the thrifty Italian immi- 
gtant sought to occupy a part of the city 
which would reduce his personal expenses 
to a minimum and leave as large a saving 
margin as possible. If later the influence 
of children and the environment generally 
made the Italian change his plans as 
regards returning to Italy, he continued 
nevertheless to reside in this area of first 
settlement. ‘Thus is explained the attrac- 
tion of the Italian settler to the Near- 
West Side and the acute competition for 
every inch of ground in which he has 
engaged. Taken by and large, the result 
has been overwhelmingly in favor of the 
Italian population, for between 1910 and 
1918 about half of the Jewish popula- 
tion of the Ghetto migrated to other 
parts of the city.” 

At present the remnants of the Jewish 


*° Other Jewish sections later sprang up in every 
part of Chicago. 

" Hull House Maps and Papers, p. 131. 

* Allison, “Population Movements in Chicago,"’ 
Journal of Social Forces, ii, 529 ff. 


SOCIAL FORCES 


population in the Ghetto are girding their 
loins in preparation for movement. The 
stimulus for this final migration was sup- 
plied by the advent of a new and prolific 
group—the Negroes. Illustrative of the 
rapidity with which colonization of this 
area by the colored settlers has been taking 
place are the data secured by Marcy Cen- 
ter in a recent study of its immediate 
neighborhood. The investigation brought 
out the fact that there were eighty-nine 
Negro families, representing over five 
hundred people, in but one block bounded 
by Frank Street, Blue Island Avenue, 
Miller Street, and Maxwell Street. In 
1895 Hull House residents reported that 
“only two colored people are found west 
of the river,’’!3 but at present the influx of 
Negroes is assuming such proportions that 
social centers, in an effort to meet the new 
situation, have been forced very largely to 
revise their programs of activities. 

Yet the movement of the colored people 
from the South Side of the city has barely 
begun. Since the World War the popula- 
tion greatly increased in the traditional 
“black belt’’ of the city’s South Side. 
This increase is causally connected with 
the general migration from the cotton 
fields to the large industrial centers, due 
on the one hand to the financial depression 
and social intolerance prevalent in the 
South, and on the other to the solicita- 
tions of enterprising northern manufac- 
turers.'4 The Near-West Side was chosen 
by the negroes for settlement presumably 
because the low rents of this section and 
the far-famed Maxwell Street “‘bargain 
matket’’ present an opportunity for rec- 
onciling meager “‘competitional earnings’’ 
with low living expenses; and also be- 
cause the West Side offers unusually con- 


13 Hull House Maps and Papers, p. 17. 

MR. H. Leavell et al, Negro Migration in 1916-17; 
U. S. Department of Labor, p. 19-27; also, A. P, 
Comstock, op. cit., p. 242. 


' 


COMMUNITY AND NEIGHBORHOOD 


venient transportation, via the Halsted 
Street artery, to the larger and older 
South Side colony. 

These and other factors may account for 
the arrival of the colored population, but 
the exodus of the remnants of the Jewish 
group is undoubtedly conditioned by this 
most recent change of population. The 
intensity and extent of the Negro influx 
have not been equalled even in this “‘land 
of constant change.”’ 


IV. SOCIAL PROBLEMS ~ 


Many things combine to make one large 
community problem. But some of these 
are more expressive and perhaps more 
fundamental than are others. Of late 
years there has been an increasing tendency 
to rely upon juvenile delinquency as a 
gauge of social health or illth. If this 
approach is justifiable, the data recently 
yielded by the Juvenile Court of Cook 
County and the Municipal Boys’ Court of 
Chicago” throw considerable light on the 
social situation in the Jewish section of 
the Near-West Side. The records of these 
courts revealed a proportionately smaller 
percentage of deliquency among the Jews 
of Chicago as a whole than among any 
of the language groups inthe city. These 
statistics could be interpreted to mean 
that the Jewish group, has preserved a 
considerable amount of control over its 
young. But among the Jews of the Near- 
West Side, the same sources indicated, 
there has been a proportionately greater 
percentage of delinquency than among the 
Jews of any other part of Chicago. 
Reasoning similarly, we may regard this 
as showing a rapid dissolution of social 
ties in the Ghetto and the consequent 
failure of the local Jewish group to en- 
force its standards. 


15 These statistics were obtained in 1922 by the 
staff of the Boys’ Department of the Jewish Social 
Service Bureau in connection with the survey of the 
Jewish Welfare Board. 


2.79 


The disparity between a proportionately 
smaller population and a proportionately 
larger rate of crime is due in the last 
analysis to the disfunction of the family 
institution. The traditional Jewish fam- 
ily is organizedona patriarchal basis. But 
although the stern authority of the father 
is supreme in the family, the mother’s 
influence, which is of a subtler kind, is at 
times more effective. Both the father 
and the mother take their cues from reli- 
gious tenets, and religious observances 
form the center around which the social 
life of the family clusters. Faithful 
devotion to a deity and repression of 
personal wishes and appetites make possi- 
ble strong control in the family. Yet the 
sanctions and taboos which are the 
mechanisms of this control retain their 
effectiveness only so long as they do not 
conflict with the standards of behavior 
to which the young become exposed else- 
where. With the acceptance of other 
standards by the young, religion passes 
into discard and the family collapses. 

The standards of conduct accepted by 
individual members of the Jewish family 
in the Chicago Ghetto before the family as 
a unit could adjust itself to them were, on 
the one hand, those of the ethnic groups 
swarming about the Near-West Side, and 
on the other, those of the larger American 
community. The process of group dis- 
placement is a socially expensive process. 
The social practices of new ethnic groups 
wedge themselves into weakly integrated 
communities and hasten their dissolution. 
Case studies recently made in Chicago and 
in other cities!® have shown that the 
culture conflicts in the families of co- 
existing groups are at the bottom of 


16 For Chicago studies, see Thomas and Znaniecki, 
The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, vol. v, and 
Louis Wirth, Culture Conflicts in Immigrant Families 
CU. of C. Thesis, Chicago, 1925); for outside studies, 
see Park and Miller, Old World Heritages Transplanted, 
and Berkovici, Around the World in New York. 


280 


the major social problems in immigrant 
settlements. 

When religion fails and the personal 
influence of the parents wanes, the com- 
munity ordinarily tests its strength at 
conserving the integrity of the home. In 
the Ghetto, however, the breakdown of 
the community itself coincided with the 
breakdown of the family. For a long 
time the Ghetto prided itself on having its 
Own recreational and educational in- 
stitutions which served to nourish and 
foster the European values of the group 
and at the same time to preserve the 
prestige of the parents. But these natural 
outgrowths of community life are no 
more to,be found. When the community 
was still ‘‘alive’’ and these institutions 
active, a breach in the family circle was in 
some measure controlled by outside pres- 
sures. But after congestion and its result, 
poor housing, deprived the young of play 
space in their homes; and after industrial- 
ization, following on the heels of conges- 
tion, drove the children to seek pleasures 
outside the former cultural agencies, the 
question with which the young were 
confronted was—Whither now? 

Could the larger urban community, with 
its political organization, arrest or at 
least retard the dissolution of the Ghetto? 
The index of constructive influences 
emanating from the larger community is 
found in the extent of naturalization in a 
given immigrant area. A small percent- 
age of naturalization indicates of course 
a correspondingly small influence on the 
part of the American environment. But 
when an immigrant neighborhood shows 
a large percentage of naturalization the 
probability is that its families have very 
largely cast off the old community influ- 
ences and taken on new standards. The 
degree of naturalization thus implies the 
degree of complete disorganization, so 
far as the old culture is concerned, and a 


SOCIAL FORCES 


corresponding degree of reorganization on 
a new basis. Naturalization then meas- 
utes at once political assimilation and 
those social permutations within the 
family which shorten “‘moral distances’’ 
between the immigrant parent and his 
native-born child and, as a consequence, 
permit of adequate organization and 
control. 

The statistical evidence gathered by the 
Jewish Welfare Board indicates that only 
43 per cent of the residents of the Ghetto 
were foreign-born in 1923, and that of 
these about half had been naturalized, thus 
leaving 21.5 per cent who wete not citi- 
zens. These statistics point to a large 
number of native-born children, which is 
in keeping with the high birth rate in 
immigrant families, and a small number 
of foreign-born parents, indicating a 
relatively small number of Jewish families. 
This seems to be in consonance with the 
established high rate of juvenile delin- 
quency prevailing in the Ghetto. It must 
be remembered that it is the children of 
immigrants, and not the immigrants 
themselves, that generally turn deliquent. 
Hence, the statistics quoted verify the 
existing situation by showing an abun- 
dance of first generation Americans on the 
one hand, and a relatively unchanged 
politico-social status of half of the older 
immigrants. Of course the fact that the 
other half of the total number of parents 
have become naturalized should prove the 
existence of some potentially stable family 
units. In these families the young, initi- 
ated in extraneous contact to different 
standards of living, succeed in reor- 
ganizing their habits in codperation with 
their parents.'? Perhaps the families to 


17 The writer has case studies indicating that these 
children bring about the removal of immigrant 
families to areas of second settlement. This however 
is only one means of securing satisfaction for their 
wishes in the family environment. 


COMMUNITY AND NEIGHBORHOOD 


which these “‘wholesome children’’ be- 
long remain strong, in spite of the im- 
potence of the neighborhood group, just 
because the parents have assimilated 
politically..® The children who turn 
delinquent are at any rate those who, 
aiming at higher standards, can not or 
for some reason do not command the 
means of achieving those standards in and 
through the family circle. These children 
ate found largely in the homes of the 50 
per cent of unnaturalized parents in this 
neighborhood. With the automatic old 
controls suspended and other cultural con- 
trols lacking, the children who are un- 
adjusted in their home environment 
become the fertile source of problem cases 
with which the social agencies and 
governmental institutions are called upon 
to deal. 


V. SOCIAL CONTROL 


How are these problems dealt with? 
Social agencies have come into existence 
in response to the need for some medium of 
control which would obviate formal 
governmental effort at adjustment by 
force. Government as we have it owes its 
Origin to the necessity of harmonizing 
contrary group forces in environments 
gtown complex. But conflicts of the 
nature observed in transitional com- 
munities do not find their solution in 
governmental control—first, because this 


18 Tn a study of ‘‘Wholesome Boys in the Chicago 
Ghetto’’ made in 1923 the writer found that in the 
competition between family standards and standards 
obtaining elsewhere the first win out when parents 
and children happen to be in the same “‘universe of 
discourse.’’ Coincidentally it developed that the 
existence of such a ‘‘universe of discourse’’ correlated 
significantly with the naturalization of the parents. 
Thus it was found that 75 per cent of the parents of 
these “‘wholesome boys’’ had become full-fledged 
citizens; that the citizenship of 5 per cent for some 
reason or other could not be determined; and that only 
20 per cent were known to be non-citizens. 


281 


control must needs be superficial and there- 
fore disregard the basic forces underlying 
community difficulties; second, because it 
is impersonal and therefore tends to 
widen differences instead of bridging 
them; and third, because it is as a rule em- 
ployed when situations reach the critical 
point in their development and not at 
some intermediate stage of the process. 

The sort of control which social agencies 
represent is based on the realization that 
after family and neighborhood cease 
Operating something else, not quite as 
drastic as formal government, is needed to 
bring about an adjustment. Perhaps the 
mode of control substituted is not as 
personal as was the control lost, but it is 
certainly less impersonal than the alter- 
native control by statute and police. The 
social agency is not a substitute for 
government by law. But if it is the 
purpose of government to secure harmony 
and maintain order, the social agency often 
succeeds in accomplishing both ends 
where the interference of government 
would be premature. 

From the point of view of good govern- 
ment a deteriorated Ghetto district is a 
public cancer; and this view is shared by 
social agencies. Still the social center 
and the family service society do not 
stand for the severance of social ties in an 
immigrant community as a means to this 
end. The Hull House, the Jewish Peo- 
ple’s Institute, the Booth House, and the 
Marcy Center!® have become convinced 
that homogeneous ethnic groups are in- 
dispensible as transitional units, that the 
“stranded immigrant’’ himself and his 
children are served best by being helped to 
pass from the community of their Euro- 
pean fellows to the American city- and 
nation-community. If the social agencies 


19 There are, in addition to these principal centers, 
eleven other social and recreational agencies on the 
Near-West Side. 


282 


have therefore “‘introduced America’ 
to the immigrant without casting asper- 
sions on the immigrant’s old-country ways 
and beliefs, they have done so on the 
theory that changes in the immigrant 
community, unless gradual, augur ill alike 
for the immigrants and the members of the 
larger community. 

Has the social agency succeeded??? Un- 
fortunately the value of social effort di- 
rected through social agencies can not be 
measured except in its negative aspects. 
Perhaps the hope of social control lies in 
the diagnosis of social failures but there 
may be equal value in properly established 
social successes. In the community under 


20In a recent article Mr. Allison, formerly of 
Booth House, points out that despite the efforts of 
various agencies, “‘every type of problem they are 
designed to wrestle with persists.’’ Vide. Journal of 
Social Forces, op. cit. 


SOCIAL FORCES 


discussion no social agency has either 
blocked the onward sweep of industry or 
lowered land values; yet directly and 
indirectly social agencies have stimulated 
movement to relieve congestion resulting 
from these conditions, and where they 
could not make immigrants more ambi- 
tious for higher levels they at least made 
them less tenacious to lower standards of 
living. The agencies have admittedly not 
succeeded in staying population pressures, 
yet they have attempted to forewarn and 
adjust conflicts in co-existing groups. 
Lastly, social agencies have not relivened 
defunct institutions or re-kindled indi- 
viduals with a new enthusiasm for 
standards they had yielded up; yet they 
have aimed to supply immigrants young 
and old with substitute standards and to 
carry to the ‘‘forlorn souls’’ among them 
the vital message of a new creed. 


